Why Is It Hard to Write About Coffee Shop Work Honestly?

A barista's day is far from the calm scenes shown in films and social media. The role involves brewing, pouring latte art, cleaning, receiving customers, and often repairs, and pay is low enough that many baristas take side gigs. Those who write about coffee shop work honestly describe it as closer to a general handyman's job than a lifestyle.

The workload differs between independent shops and chain stores. Chain shops run high volume and tight routines, while independent cafés spread duties differently and may ask staff to help with new store preparation and bar design. The customer's view, calm and polished, only holds from the outside; behind it sits constant cleaning, service, and limited room to grow.

Many people are drawn in by the cozy scenes of cafés in films, TV shows, or social media, assuming that a barista's life is all about basking in the sunshine, listening to jazz, and brewing coffee elegantly. But the real profession of a barista is far from that romantic. This article will restore the true situation of baristas in chain and independent cafés from multiple angles—job skills, daily tasks, types of customers, and industry realities—and explore just how tough this job is and what room for growth it offers. If you're considering entering the industry, or are simply curious about baristas, this article will give you an answer without any filters.

Movies and social platforms often paint an overly idealistic picture of life in a café: a barista in a warm little shop bathed in sunlight, with soothing jazz playing, calmly making pour-over coffee, drawing beautiful patterns in lattes, with a firm and cheerful gaze, greeting customers coming and going, and the whole day quietly passing in peace and leisure...

But reality is not like that at all!

Snap out of it! What a barista does is, frankly speaking, not much different from a general handyman, and the pay is really not high...

Many friends who have already entered the industry complain like this: "Being a barista can only be a lifestyle posture; in reality you're broke as can be! You have to take on some side gigs."

That's not an exaggeration at all. First, let's look at exactly what skills a barista needs to master! (The content is too long, so I wrote it in my notes and then took a screenshot.)

Do you see the bolded lines in the screenshot, especially the last two paragraphs? "Salary doesn't matter, I can survive without money"... If you can accept this, welcome to the ranks of baristas; if you can't, please think twice before acting... Of course, more work brings more pay. If a barista, besides brewing coffee, cleaning, and receiving customers, also has to do the things listed after "preparing new stores, bar design..." in the picture, then congratulations—you are an all-around barista with no rest time. People who can reach that level are either the client or baristas who treat making coffee as a side job.

All those beautiful imaginings only hold true from the customer's perspective. Behind the seemingly glamorous life of a barista lies endless hardship... The customers you imagine: gentle and polite, quietly coming in, flipping through a book, sipping coffee, enjoying a coffee moment.

The customers you actually meet (some of them): loud and noisy, shouting "Waiter, I want to order," leaving their coffee aside to take all kinds of photos, demanding "I want my pour-over warm," ordering a latte but no milk, interrogating "What kind of coffee shop is this if there's no tea," and even asking "Do you have toothpicks here?"... And the probability of meeting your ideal customer is about the same as drawing a hidden edition from a blind box.

Is café work very relaxed? Not at all! Cafés come in all shapes and sizes—some sell cakes and light meals, and some are combined with bookstores or clothing stores into composite businesses. In such shops, the busiest part is often not the coffee output, but all sorts of tasks outside of coffee. Nominal title: barista; actual role: a waiter who can make coffee.

"No way! I've really seen very idle cafés! The staff or the owner just sit there scrolling on their phones or looking at computers." There are only two possibilities in this situation: one is that this shop is actually an offline experience point, and the real money-making business is e-commerce; the other is just enjoy it while you can—who knows, the owner may be calculating how much longer the funds can last.

Café customers are not all artsy young people. They can roughly be divided into three types: ordinary consumers, who quietly drink their coffee after ordering—the angel type; picky coffee enthusiasts, who can complain for ages over a half-understood point, but as long as your coffee knowledge is solid enough and you can talk with them, you can become a "big shot" in their eyes; and a special group with a strong sense of self-cultural identity, who act as if they alone matter, leaving you with no choice but to stand helplessly by.

Besides strong customer service skills, baristas also have to constantly enrich their coffee knowledge—from agricultural cultivation to coffee basics, from roasting and brewing to industry trends and developments... Anything related to coffee requires deep understanding, so that they can convey the correct view of coffee culture to coffee novices, rather than merely staying at the level of "I want to make a good cup of coffee."

Second, many people want to become baristas because they dream of unlimited coffee brewing and unlimited coffee drinking every day. There's a saying: "Too much of anything makes it worthless." When you're facing coffee all day long, and you don't genuinely want to understand it deeply, you'll soon grow tired of the job and end up sighing: it's happier to just be an enthusiast.

Many colleagues mention in casual chats that ever since they started making coffee or opening a café, their temper has gotten worse and their stress has grown. Because the actual situation is completely different from what they imagined, and it's extremely exhausting. Yes, if at the beginning you were only longing for a life of brewing coffee and latte art, reality will hit you hard... Why? Because the best-selling item in cafés is actually lemon tea... (This is a meme, and also a portrayal of many cafés compromising with reality.)

Although this article has said a lot to discourage everyone from holding overly idealized expectations about opening a café or becoming a barista, being a barista is not without prospects—it's just that many people's thinking stays at the level of "I like brewing coffee and drinking coffee." Opening a café isn't necessarily unprofitable, but you can't do business on idealistic sentiment alone; at least in today's society, that won't work. Persisting in ideals is a good thing, but reality is ultimately reality.

It's not that we don't support everyone in becoming baristas or opening cafés, but we hope that before taking action, you first think clearly about what you really want. Over the years of being in touch with this industry, the writer clearly knows that baristas in both chain cafés and independent cafés work very hard... The former are like emotionless coffee robots, but you can learn some management knowledge useful for future work, and also temper a good temper for receiving guests; the latter may not be busy making coffee when you're busiest, but as long as you're motivated enough and keep humbly learning or improving yourself, you'll discover that the coffee industry isn't only about brewing and drinking coffee—there are things more interesting than those. Only when you become strong yourself can you look further.

If you chose this profession only because you think a barista's job is easy, please think twice.

Standing still will never bring you any progress; instead, it will waste a lot of precious time.

Every job has its own unspeakable hardships, and no job is truly comfortable. There was once a sentence in a book that left a deep impression on the writer: "Your so-called stability and comfort are nothing but wasting your life." Don't waste your precious "capital" just because you feel comfortable for a moment.

Image source: Internet For professional coffee knowledge exchange and more coffee bean information, please follow Coffee Workshop (WeChat public account: cafe_style)

The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.